Science —

Measuring the boss from hell

The developers of a "Workplace Arrogance Scale" look at what it's told them.

Almost everyone has experienced a boss from hell at one point or another in their careers, but how many of us could quantify just how unpleasant the experience is? Thanks to some hard-working psychologists, that's now possible—at least for some forms of unpleasantry. A team has spent four years immersed in the study of workplace arrogance, and emerged with what they term the "Workplace Arrogance Scale," or WARS. In a recent review, they've looked back on what they've learned about arrogance, and the results are pretty ugly.

Erik Herbert

They illustrate the problem of arrogance with the person behind AIG's disastrous trading group, one Joe Cassano. According to the authors, "Cassano had penchants for yelling, cursing, bad-mouthing others, and belittling colleagues, as well as little tolerance for opposing viewpoints." Years after, with all the problems obvious to most observers, he's taken to blaming the failure on others.

This, the authors note, is typically arrogant behavior: disparaging others as a way to exaggerate your own self-importance, possibly as a way of covering over personal insecurities, all wrapped up in the inability to incorporate feedback from the people you disparage. Although there are elements of narcissism and hubris involved, the authors point out that both of these traits don't require interactions with others. (People can get overconfident when they're making decisions on their own, and all a narcissist needs is a mirror). Arrogance, in contrast, is all about how a person presents themselves to others.

To get a handle on arrogance, Russ Johnson and Stan Silverman (along with various collaborators and students) spent four years developing and refining WARS. Workers and managers were asked to describe the behaviors they considered arrogant, and these were distilled down to a series of questions that other groups matched to arrogant behavior. Once the questions were refined, they were modified so that people could answer the questions about their own level of arrogance without it being obvious that they were rating a socially undesirable trait. The end result included 26 questions, with answers rated on a five-point scale.

To confirm its accuracy, self-reported scores were compared with ratings provided by co-workers; they matched up very well. The one place where ratings diverged was when the arrogant individual's superiors were asked to rate them. Managers consistently underrated the arrogance of their underlings, a trend that the authors ascribe to the fact that arrogant people know their place in corporate hierarchies, and only unload on people below them on the food chain.

With arrogance quantified, the researchers went back and looked at the personality traits and consequences of arrogant behavior. "As expected, high scores on the WARS are associated with high social dominance and trait anger, as well as with several narcissistic tendencies (e.g., entitlement, superiority)," they found. In addition, arrogance is associated with weaker cognitive ability and low self-esteem (and is probably a coping measure for these).

The authors found that arrogance not only created a poisonous atmosphere at the workplace, but it actively hindered the ability to get projects done: "These results highlight an interesting paradox: Employees who act superior in actuality have inferior performance." The authors suggest this creates a vicious cycle, where failures fuel a greater sense of personal inadequacy, and thus more arrogant behavior. The failures themselves are ascribed to an arrogant person's inability to seriously consider advice from other members of the team: "A weak learning orientation also causes people to identify others to blame when setbacks or failures are experienced, instead of revising performance strategies or uncovering why problems occurred."

Typically, these sorts of vicious cycles can be hard to break, but that may not be the case with arrogance. "Fortunately arrogance is a cluster of changeable behaviors, driven by relatively malleable beliefs," the authors note. But doing so would necessarily involve identifying the problem and intervening, and the earlier the better. Of course, judging by the AIG example given earlier, there are probably some workplace environments where arrogance may not be considered a negative personality trait.